USB Lotfe 7 bombsight controls

[hegykc]

Designing the Lotfe 7 bombsight for my He-111 simpit.
It will bi cut from plywood or mdf, by a laser cutter or a waterjet.
I'll try to hook the buttons and rotary encoders up to a cheap joystick or a gamepad control board .

Almost finished with the altitude adjustment wheel.
The gears are designed so that a full circle on the wheel translates to 600 clicks on the rotary encoder. That's what the game has modeled for altitude adjustment, one click for every 10 meters up to 6.000.

It also features "clickers", soft ones for every 100 meters and harder ones for every 1.000 meters.
And a limiter, so that the wheel only turns 360 degrees.

So there'l be no need to watch those blue in-game massages.
The value on the wheel will correspond to the value in the game.

The wheel might be cut from plexiglass and engraved, so that the lettering can be illuminated.
What would be the coolest thing ever, is if I could get the bombsight view on a 15" 17" monitor and a reticule to look through, now that would be a real bombsight.

I'm designing this in a 3d CAD program so there'l be no real "build progress" pictures. Once I complete the design on a computer, I just send the files to be cut on a machine, and than just assemble the pieces.

Some 3d renderings of the altitude adjustment module:

[bolox]

nice idea on the controls:grin:

I'd be concerned that the rotary encoder (for alt in particular) missing' input clicks if rotated fast thus leading to dial being out of step with game- i'm using a rotary encoder for this atm and it does this for me.
Think it would be an idea to try a mock up of an encoder with gearing to test the principle first.

Can't think of a way of displaying bombsight view on another screen, I don't think this is possible.
One thing that is possible is to extract data from game
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?p=342338#post342338

you can get data for bombsight controls positions from this;)- I can get the data to display as a kind of 'speedbar' on screen. It is possible to send this data (via network to another computer?) which could 'drive' the dials with something like stepper motors??
- would require some degree of coding ability tho:confused:

[hegykc]

Never built anything for a flight sim before so didn't really know that about rotary encoders. Thanks for the heads up bolox.

I guess that's why they range anything from 1$ to 30$ a piece.
So worst case scenario, I'l have to use more expensive ones, or improvise my own wiht buttons and some more gears.

Or, as you say, use a servo motor. That way, when you engage bombsight automation the wheel will turn with the game, another cool feature.

About the monitor, I read there are programs that will let you put gauges on seperate monitors, maybe there's something there. But that's just a bonus anyway...

[bolox]

I don't think an expensive rotary encoder is the solution. I think the problems lays in the fact that a rotary encoder can generate pulses faster than the computer/simulation can keep up.

If this is your first build i would highly recommend you test out the electronics interface and how it reacts with sim before committing to build. Games tend to be built to accept keyboard/joystick inputs and sometimes don't behave as expected (and sometimes things are modelled in a peculiar way)

Dunno if this is of any use/interest to you but this is a little mission/script to put bombsight parameters in server bar. If nothing else it shows how to get instrument data from game (it's a Ju88 mission but it gives an idea)

http://www.mediafire.com/?6sch8633dpgsfkv

[hegykc]

Oh I see, again thanks for for the info. Yes I'll definitely run tests first.
But I'm building it anyway, worst case scenario the wheel won't be engraved and calibrated to the game.
But I'll try to not let it come to that compromise.

Also, my coding abilities are about zero, so I'm trying to keep everything mechanical for now.

So I just tested this: (for the encoder in the bombsight distance module)
The game takes 27 seconds to bring the bombsight from the down/vertical position to the up right/80 degree position. Given that I counted 302 keyboard strokes for the same operation, that's a little over 11 clicks per second, 10 to be on the safe side.
And 20 seconds for the altitude wheel, given that it's 600 clicks, that's 20 clicks per second.
So I'l just have to tighten the bolts up, so that it takes some time to turn the bombsight wheels up/down, so that rotary encoders don't generate more than 10 clicks per second.
And that's convenient because it probably took some force and time to turn the real thing, so that would just add to the realism.

This is a very primitive method but it should work, and most importantly, it should be cheap and simple, which is what I'm going for...